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“12 Years a Slave” and Our Hopeless Conversation About Race

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“12 Years a Slave” and Our Hopeless Conversation About Race

December 4, 2013 4:05 pmDecember 4, 2013 4:05 pm

In the past month, two prominent liberal writers — my former colleague Frank Rich and my frequent sparring partner Jonathan Chait — have written pieces for New York Magazine linking the film “12 Years a Slave” to contemporary debates about race and conservatism. Both pieces, unfortunately, are textbook examples of why those debates tend to go nowhere in a hurry.

Rich’s piece is intended as a critique of liberal naivete about the power of art to shape and change contemporary politics. Despite the hopes of some viewers and writers, he writes, “12 Years a Slave” isn’t likely to be remembered as a cultural-political landmark, because there’s no way that it will shift the current political alignment on racially-charged issues like voter ID laws and stop-and-frisk:

… Could this film possibly preach to the unconverted? Could it reach Americans who at this late date, in the 21st century, still haven’t gotten [Harriet Beecher] Stowe’s message? Will it even be seen by any of the millions who swear by Glenn Beck? …

…. whenever mainstream media start gushing en masse about a cultural work with an uplifting historical or political message, a smaller liberal echo chamber does spring up that I’ve at times been part of: We tend to assume that a wide audience will be converted by the power of the new masterpiece at hand, especially under the tutelage of critics, editorial pages, magazine cover stories, and awards ceremonies. … Surely, we think, no one could possibly watch the protracted whipping scenes of 12 Years a Slave without seeing them as unusually effective depictions of slavery’s horrors. In reality, some hostile viewers might dismiss the same scenes as over-the-top hectoring designed to rub white moviegoers’ noses in guilt.

The Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern has cheered 12 Years a Slave as a furious polemic that “seems certain to transcend the movie realm and become a new reference point in contemporary culture.”… It would be great if Morgenstern and the others who are saying much the same (e.g., “A game-changing movie event!”) are correct about the transcendence of 12 Years a Slave. But in all likelihood the film’s polemic won’t even move the editorial page of Morgenstern’s own Rupert Murdoch–owned paper, which has led the charge for those new voter-identification laws that will suppress voting by descendants of the black characters onscreen.

Chait’s piece, meanwhile, is effectively a long discussion of the ways in which conservatives are immovable — they can’t acknowledge that “measured, traditional white-on-black racism persists,” they may believe that whites are now discriminated against as much if not more than blacks, and (here he cites a recent column by Quinn Hillyer attacking the president’s alleged arrogance) they can’t recognize the way their own anti-Obama rhetoric makes them at best unconsciously racially insensitive, at worst “cultural heir[s]” to the vicious overseer in “12 Years a Slave” … “a southern white reactionary enraged that a calm, dignified, educated black man has failed to prostrate himself.”

In the end, Chait writes, “conservatives can transport themselves for two hours into the hellish antebellum world of ’12 Years a Slave’ and experience the same horror and grief that liberals feel. What they cannot do, almost uniformly, is walk out of the theater and detect the still-extant residue of that world all around them.”

Because it links a specific conservative pundit (with however many caveats) to the horrors on screen in Steve McQueen’s film, Chait’s piece attracted more controversy in my Twitter feed than Rich’s did. In fairness, though, he at least concedes that conservatives might be moved by the movie and appalled by the cruelties it depicts, rather than just marinating in white resentment throughout its running time, as Rich imagines Glenn Beck fans doing.

But both writers make a similar conceptual mistake. They imagine that a great (or at least very good) film about the world of slavery should make it easier for people to “detect the still-extant residue of that world all around them,” and only the persistence of ideological blinkers and right-wing groupthink explains why a movie like “12 Years a Slave” will, as Rich laments, probably “never get a hearing with the tea-party brigade.”

But the reverse is more likely to be the case. When you watch a film in which black people are kidnapped, sold as chattel, whipped and beaten, raped and starved, torn from their families, and otherwise treated as subhumans in law and custom both, the gap between that kind of structural racism and the kind of structural racism that manifests itself in differential arrest and prosecution rates, wealth and income gaps, and hiring and interviewing decisions could actually seem much, much larger than it did before you watched the worst realities of slavery depicted on screen. Which is why, if you want to convince someone who believes that American society is increasingly colorblind, and that if anything white people are getting a raw deal these days, to reconsider both of those premises, asking him to recognize his own cultural kinship to slavedrivers is quite possibly the most counterproductive way imaginable to go about it. (Whatever historical connection liberals may discern, the gulf between calling a president “haughty” in a column and whipping a slave for insolence is so extraordinarily vast that the alleged link is extraordinarily easy to dismiss.)

What makes this mistake unfortunate is that Chait is right that conservatives often have a blind spot about race, both where their movement’s history is concerned and when it comes to reckoning with the present-day burdens imposed on African-Americans. (I recommend this piece from Philip Klein, this one from Tim Carney, and this historical take from William Voegeli as examples of right-of-center writers wrestling with this reality.) And the Obama era, for all sorts of reasons, has made this blind spot worse, and made it easier for principled conservative stances to blur into a kind of white identity politics, infused with grievance and paranoia.

A fruitful conversation about race in America, then, would require both sides to somehow pick a different starting point. To get a fair hearing from liberals — and, more importantly, from black Americans — the right would need to begin from a place of greater empathy for the black experience, and greater respect for the historical reasons that voter ID laws and Rush Limbaugh soliloquies can raise so many hackles. To get a fair hearing from conservatives, liberals would need to begin by imputing racism less frequently, attacking racially-entangled policies that aren’t remotely like Jim Crow on the merits rather than just calling them Jim Crow, Round Two, and recognizing that (as with Hitler analogies) the sooner you link your interlocutors to slaveowners, the faster they will tune you out.

Obama-era conservatism has often gone backward, not forward, where this potential conversation is concerned. But a liberalism that expects conservatives to see their present-day positions and rhetoric illuminated and condemned by a cinematic portrait of the evils of slavery in 1840s Louisiana — or that declares them unreachable when they don’t — is a liberalism that’s as unready for dialogue as any insensitive right-wing talk show host.

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Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.